From: Philippe Verdy (verdy_p@wanadoo.fr)
Date: Sat Mar 27 2004 - 05:12:47 EST
> On 2004.03.26, 23:37, Rick McGowan <rick@unicode.org> wrote:
> > The Unicode Technical Committee has posted new issues for public
> > review and comment. Details are on the following web page:
>
> I just added the following to the On-Line Report Form:
>
> > U+0140 : LATIN SMALL LETTER L WITH MIDDLE DOT, approx. similar to
> > U+006C U+00B7, is said to be used for Catalan. That is not correct.
> > Catalan usual orthography uses a regular middle dot to separate two
> > "L"s in those cases where they are pronounced as a single one,
> > doubled only for etymological reasons.
> >
> > This dot is not connected to the previous "L" in any way, as if it
> > were some kind of diacritical. It is a standalone character -- akin
> > to the hyphen in French or Portuguese.
> >
> > This becomes evident when composing with extra-space between
> > letters: there is no "tie" between the first "L" and the dot.
Interesting comment, because I had always thought that this middle-dot was a
modifier of the previous L, and I didn't think about syllabic hyphenation.
> > Using this character for Catalan texts additionally causes
> > hyphenation problems.
So what would be the "hyphenation problems"?
Do you mean that when there's a line break opportunity between <L, middle-dot>
and <L>, no additional hyphen mark should be inserted because the middle-dot is
already the appropriate hyphen to mark that the word is not terminated at the
line break?
Also what is the normal placement of the middle-dot after a uppercase L letter,
doesn't it kern into the space above the horizontal bar?
If I understand what you say here, that it's not a diacritic that modifies that
first L, so that this middle-dot is effectively a orthographic hyphen similar in
essence to other orthographic hyphens that are used to create compound words, or
to mark the inversion of the verb and pronominal subject in french questions
(sometimes with an added phonetic "t" as in "pense-t-il?" , or to the apostrophe
used to mark an ellision of some final letters in many languages ("j'aime", "je
t'aime" in French, similar examples in Italian) or leading letters ("it's") or
even some medial letters ("they aren't" in English).
But in that case, is that middle-dot to be considered as a regular punctuation
mark in Catalan? Which category would you use to describe this character,
independantly of the current assignment of U+00B7?
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